Minnesota Center Against Violence and Abuse: We are making the CEDV tool freely accessible through the MINCAVA website. The purpose of the tool is to provide practicing professionals and researchers with a standard method to measure the level of exposure to domestic violence that a child may have experienced, allowing for recognition of a continuum of child experiences and the need for corresponding continuum of interventions and practice techniques. It is designed to be self-administered by 10 to 16 year old children. Link to CEDV Web Site
All posts by MiPSAC
Meeting the Educational Needs of Students in the Child Welfare System: Lessons Learned from the Field
July 2012, Advocates for Children of New York: Over the last decade, child welfare agencies and advocates have begun to recognize that the students they serve need access to greater educational opportunities, and that education is critically important to child wellbeing, permanency planning and a successful transition to adulthood. In particular, best practices research has consistently identified education advocacy as an effective strategy to improve school stability and educational outcomes for this population of vulnerable youth. This report offers insights from one program, called Project Achieve, which pairs Advocates for Children of New York (“AFC”), a non-profit that provides education advocacy to low-income students in New York City, with local foster care and preventive services agencies. The report explains how Project Achieve works and examines its long-term impact on the children and families served by these agencies, the people who work there and the city’s child welfare system itself. Link to Report
Neighbor to Family Sibling Foster Care Model
California Evidence-Based Clearinghouse for Child Welfare: The Neighbor To Family Sibling Foster Care Model is a child-centered, family-focused foster care model is designed to keep sibling groups, including large sibling groups, together in stable foster care placements while working intensively on reunification or permanency plans that keep the siblings together. The program uses a community-based, team-oriented approach, including foster caregivers and birth parents as part of the treatment team. Trained and supported foster caregivers are key to the model’s success. Neighbor To Neighbor professionalized this key role by placing these trained foster caregivers on the payroll with salaries and benefits. Foster families, birth families, and children receive comprehensive and intensive services including individualized case management, advocacy, and clinical services on a weekly basis. Link to Program Description
Earlier is Better for Family Care: What Research Tells Us About Young Children and Institutionalization
August 2012, Adoption Advocate: This paper briefly summarizes four distinct sets of research on the impact of institutionalization on children. Three are seminal studies specific to the CEE/CIS1 region, covering a wide range of issues in child development. The fourth is a set of meta-analyses based on thousands of adopted children worldwide. Consistent with these studies are new and important findings on the brain development of children. The findings of these and other similar research studies are many, and can be pursued by further studying the resources highlighted in the appendix to this paper. One inescapable conclusion is clear from the research highlighted here: for the sake of their development, it is of the utmost importance for young children to be in nurturing family-based environments early in their young lives.
Link to pdf Report
Special Needs Do Not Disappear with Adoption: The Need for Post-Adoption Services
July 26-28, NACAC Conference: About 90% of the children in foster care have “special needs,” representing challenges in placing them for adoption. Specialized support and preservation services save families and benefit society. The types of post adoption services required to help many of these families clearly go beyond weekly counseling sessions; they involve:
• family therapeutic interventions with home-based service availability
• 24-hour phone support in emergencies
• advocacy for other needed services (educational, diagnostic, etc.)
• child and parent support groups
• case coordination with other professionals
• respite care
Workers providing these services need specialized training in a range of competencies and interventions. Evaluations of such programs that exist in two states document their effectiveness (Smith & Howard, 1999; Atkinson & Gonet, 2007). Link to Conference Handouts
Social Media in Child Welfare: Uses, Pitfalls, and Opportunities
July 26-28, NACAC Conference: AdoptUSKids’ mission is two-fold: to raise public awareness about the need for foster and adoptive families for children in the public child welfare system; and to assist U.S. States, Territories and Tribes to recruit and retain foster and adoptive families and connect them with children. The AdoptUSKids website: adoptuskids.org
Geared toward families and child welfare professionals. Link to Slide Presentation